Teacher Podcast #4 - The Lawrenceburg Middle School Pilot - Getting Permission

Jamie, welcome back to this podcast series.

Hello.

Okay, so now we're going to actually get into the school pilot. How do you get any of this approved in a school? This is, this is a question that I had for a couple of years. So as I mentioned, back in 2012, I started Organized 365. For the first 3 years, I was an in-home professional organization company where I and then a team of people went out and organized people in Cincinnati. As I was doing that, I realized a couple of things. Cincinnati, Ohio homes are basically all exactly the same. Like, there's just not a lot of— might be a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller. There's just not a lot of variety of the, the actual structure of a home in Cincinnati. They're, they're very, very similar. However, sometimes I'd be organizing families that had young children. Sometimes I'd be organizing empty nesters where their children had grown. Sometimes I was organizing a professional with no children. Sometimes I was organizing people who were in advanced age, ready for moving into a retirement situation, retirement home. And yet all of these homes are pretty much the same. Like, they all had basically the square footage of the same kitchen. The kitchen layouts were like a handful of layouts, not a lot of variety in the layouts, just not a lot of difference in the actual home. The difference was how people were using the home. And especially in Cincinnati, some people like myself moved into my home a year after we got married. I've been married 29 years. We've lived in this home 28 years. Like, we move in and we settle in and we just stay there. Like, we're not hopping houses a lot in Cincinnati. There's not a lot of housing market. One of the things I learned during that time is even though we have, you know, a division of GE is headquartered here, we have P&G, we have Kroger, we have Luxottica, we have Ethicon are all headquartered here in Cincinnati. A lot of big companies are headquartered here. People in leadership would come and live in Cincinnati for a stint in order to do their at-home office period of time, a year, 18 months, 3 years, and then head back out around the world wherever they were living and working. We don't have a good house rental market. So when you would move into Cincinnati in one of these C-level positions, you would buy a home. Because there's no home to rent in Cincinnati. There just is not a lot of household inventory in Cincinnati. So I learned all of those things in the first 3 years. The next 3 years, I started the podcast, and then I had a team going in and organizing people's houses. And the reason I started the podcast is because I'm a teacher, and I was learning a lot of things, and I wanted to teach how the way in which we use our home changes throughout our lifespan. So the house that you move in without children functions one way, and then it functions differently when you have young children and they're in preschool. It functions differently when they go to full-time school, functions differently when they become middle schoolers and high schoolers. Ultimately, those children's bedrooms, which I renamed to mini apartments, become the launching pad for their adult life. And then they move the things from their childhood bedroom into a dorm room, a condo, or an apartment. But along the way, they also need the paper that goes with that, which is information management. and the knowledge that their parents have about the intellectual understanding of that unique child's medical needs, financial needs, educational needs as they launch into their adult life and they start the cycle over again. Our kitchens go from being where we just heat up something at night to full-on family dinners as our kids are younger, back to more like a convenience store and a diner as our kids are in middle school and high school. And then you have to titrate back to only cooking for 1 or 2 once you're in that empty nesting phase, while also maintaining all of the kitchen supplies possible, because you are now where the holidays are. So you have to be able to do Thanksgiving and also feed 1 or 2 people for the rest of the time. It's really an interesting way to set up your kitchen when you are in middle age and beyond. And so I got really good at Taking assessment of who was living in the house and then modifying the house for the phase of life you're in and giving people permission to— well, if you love Legos and the kids are 7 or 8, like, just take this whole room and make it a Lego room because you'll use it that way for 10 years. So just have this spare bedroom become the Lego room, or have this den become the Lego room, or put a library in your house. Like, take any room you want, put bookshelves around the entire room and make it a library because you love books. Like, Make your house reflect who you are. And that's where the podcast came from. The last 6 years we have invented, manufactured, and produced a couple of unique products, mostly that make the invisible work visible. So in this pilot, we're gonna be talking about the Teacher Work Box. That is to make the invisible administration part of the teaching job visible and a way to organize it. The first box was the Sunday Basket. The Sunday basket organizes all of the household projects, mail, ongoing to-dos on the kitchen counter for weekly processing and planning. And the Friday work box is for a more traditional job. It could be— you could be a solopreneur, entrepreneur. You could do it from home. It could also be for a traditional job in a corporation. It makes invisible the— it makes visible the invisible work of work work, like email, job descriptions, meetings, deciding what the next product is going to be. Usually in traditional corporations or jobs, you know what the project you're working on is or the product that you're about to launch, but you forget about the invisible things of the meetings that it takes to do that, the ideas that need to be generated to do that, and then all of the ongoing, um, email and job description work to keep the company going while you launch your new product. So all that to say, Jamie had been following me for quite a while, and she heard on the podcast that I really, really, really wanted to try some pilots with my products. I am getting my PhD now. I'm going to Fielding Graduate University, getting a general psychology PhD. And we have this teacher workbox, and I knew this would not be an academic pilot. Like, I didn't run it through IRB. I don't have my PhD yet. But Jamie and I are both like, we know there's something here. Let's see if we can find support for what we know is— has worked for me and what work has worked for her in a larger group of people. Jamie said, I know I can get the permission to do this in my school. That was the thing I was lacking. I couldn't find any school districts or buildings where the entire school would start a pilot. So I threw this out on social media, I'm sure, and some coffee chat podcast. And Jamie just kept emailing. She's like, I think I could do this in my building. I know I could do this in my building. I think we should do this. And then I think, did we get on the phone or were we just Voxering back and forth? 4th of July weekend, of course, when we're supposed to be like with our family.

I think we did Zoom and then you talked to me about Voxer. Yeah.

Okay. Yes. You kept saying we could do this, we could do this, we could do this. In the summer, I do a teacher camp, which kind of kicks off the new school year. The second week in July. So this was the first week of July. You were like emailing me. You're like, I think we could do this. I want to do this. And I was like, okay, well, if you don't care, let's get on Zoom, because if you want to do this, I want your teachers to be able to join us in the live camp if they want to. That's what happened. We got on Zoom. What were you thinking on your side before we decided to go for this? Like, why did you think this would work? Why were you pushing me for this? How did you even think you could get this approved?

Well, so over the time, I'm a very vocal person. I think we've all probably realized that by now. And so everybody kind of knew, everybody that knew me well had seen the box on the side of my desk. And I think I would atone different things to it. I would go to meetings with my slash pockets and that kind of thing. And I think they all saw a change in me. And so when, when it— when you were talking about it on, I think it was a podcast, I think I listened to all the things. So I just knew this year there was just going to be some things that I had not had a ton of. So Student behaviors have increased dramatically since the pandemic. And so that I knew was going to be a change. Not that I thought that the box could necessarily help with that. It was just more strategies. My biggest concern was I have never had as many new staff as I had this year. I had retirements, I had transfers. I had 8 new staff members, 4 of which were in my special education department, making my entire special education department new. Not just new, but have never taught special ed. Some of them had at least taught teaching-wise, but they had never taught special ed. And I had a new assistant principal. So there was a lot that I knew. there were a lot of changes coming. And so I just kept thinking, this is the perfect time to teach them something from the ground up, and especially for so many new teachers of, hey, this is how we do it and here's some strategies for you. My biggest concern, my— I called my superintendent and again, like, we're a small corp. We have one— we have 4 buildings. I'm principal of one of them. He kind of joked and said, is that that thing on the side of your desk that makes you proactively email me all the time? And I was like, yes. And he's like, go ahead, do it. And I was like, okay, thanks. And he's, he's approved things over the years of me going to trainings and the work, the meeting mastermind. I was able to get into that and And that those kinds of things. So it wasn't that I've never spoke to him about Organized 365 before, right? Like he's, he has seen that company come across his desk. And so he was, again, he was, he was open to it. We're all, we're very much about staff, keeping staff because you don't realize how much training goes into training a new staff member, even if they've been a teacher before.

Mm-hmm.

Just moving to a new corporation, it's, it's different and you have to train them how you want them trained and, and that type of thing. Like just, just the amount of money that we spend on that every year. And this, I think, sets them up for success. So he was pretty much on board right away because We were so close, I was able to drive over and get the boxes. And I have a van. So, you know, I guess that's one of the privileges of having 2 children that I probably should have already, like, downgraded back to an SUV, but I still have a minivan. And so we loaded them all up in my car. To the point that I think when I first drove up, Joey helped bring them out. He was like, what are you doing with all of this? Like, it was like, what is going on right now?

Did you go rob Lisa?

I did. I did. Yeah. And so it was, it was super fun. And then, you know, I reached out to staff. So expectations for summer for my staff is that they check email at least once a week. I am not asking them to do anything crazy, but like at least check it in case something big goes down. Because if we do have to hire any new staff, I always involve other staff on that because it's— they— the new teacher has to not only work with the current staff, they have to work with the admin. So we all need to be on the same page. So I just ask them to check it once a week. So I sent out— We have a program that we can send out a message. I sent out a text message to everybody that was like, hey, I did send something out. If you're interested, reach out to me. And I think we had— I want to say it was like I tracked it. I should have brought that home with me. I think it was like 13 people that came in and got it before the teacher camp. So they actually made a trip to school to pick it up. But I also told them there were, there were 2 colors. So I told them that, like, I remember one color. I think I had more of one than the other. So I was like, hey, if you want your choice of colors, you gotta come early, right? And so, so they would come in and I would teach them how to put it together and kind of give them a very short synopsis. And then I would just tell them, like, join in on teacher camp. And it was really neat to see the ones that embraced it from the get-go. And then, then we had the first day of school meeting. So I talked about it there. I explained to them what all was going to go when you came and what that was going to look like. We had some more that took the boxes that day, and then we had some that took them after your first visit.

Okay. So from my point of view, or here's what I've learned. I have not only created products that make the invisible work visible, I've created products that are invisible in your budget.

Nobody has—

nobody has organizational money in their household budget. No school has money for teacher school supplies. That's basically what this is. They— that literally is not a category. And in corporations, you do have professional development money and things like that, but usually it's not for the invisible administration work of your business is for these big, huge initiatives that sound great, and, and they are great. But really, the drudgery, the, the monotony, the administration of life, we do not ascribe dollars or time to. We spend a lot of time on it, but we don't really realize we spend that time on it. And so we don't prioritize our dollars that way.

Correct.

Makes it a little bit of a hard sell. So I knew of you before we decided to do this pilot program. We had met in person. You are a certified organizer inside of Organize 365. You have a professional organization company on the side as well. So, so I knew of you. And I think the reason why this was such a great partnership was because you have already received the transformation of home organization, personal paper organization, and work organization by investing the time into Organize 365. And that is where right now Organized 365 has this gap between we know these products and services work, and yet the amount of time to achieve the transformation, as I mentioned in the prior podcast, is 3 years at home. It's at least a, a year in business, at least, but usually a couple of years in business. So because of that, from instruction to actually becoming a habit and you receiving the transformation is such a long time.

Yeah.

We have teachers who have achieved this transformation, but inside of their building they are a teacher. So when in the last podcast we talked about teachers, assistant principals, principals, superintendents, they are the teacher. And now that we know what the assistant principal, the principal, and the superintendent are dealing with, like, they're, they're like, great, glad you can figure out your lesson plans. That's what we hired you for. Like, it's like not earth-shattering that you're now organized as a teacher for these upper-level management. But what I think is really— why I think this is really important and why I'm investing so much time in this, as opposed to just focusing on the other product lines that I have, is because all the way back to episode 1, this— teachers have passion and they push themselves to burnout, and then they opt out. And so I think if we go back to your comment that it is very expensive to hire and onboard a new teacher. My goal in the Teacher Workbox is to keep teachers in the profession longer, even if that's just 1 to 3 more years. Buy you some more time. So when we got on that Zoom over 4th of July weekend, it might have even been on the 4th of July because we were both nuts. I think it was.

I think it was.

Would you? And you're like, yes. I was like, all right, I'm gonna take it. It was at that time when you explained how awesome your corporation is and how close-knit all of your teachers are and how wonderful everything in your building is. It's at that time where you told me, I said, well, what, what challenges do you have coming up? And you're like, oh, I have a new assistant principal and I've got 8 new staff. And I'm like, oh, where are the new staff? And you're like, oh, well, you know, 4 of them are in special education. I'm like, oh, of how many total? And that's when I said to you, oh, Jamie, we must do this because you are headed for a brick wall. That you're not seeing. Like, I was the one that said to you, this is in a, in a staff of 50, this amount of newness, even a great culture is not going to be able to overcome this great amount of newness. And at that time, we didn't even know the behavior issues that were going to come.

Right.

Like, that had not been seen yet. And it was at that point where I said, well, for sure, we're going to do this. And obviously, I funded the, the work boxes that were needed for the teachers. And I thought, okay, I've been given this amazing opportunity. This school district's school corporation is only 35 minutes from my office because it's right over the border from Ohio to Indiana. And I was like, I am going to do everything I possibly can in order to get data and make a difference in these teachers' lives in this building. And then after we're all said and done, we'll figure out what was it that worked What didn't work and what could scale if we were going to do this in more corporations that were not as close to Organize 365 as possible. So there are a lot of things you're going to hear in these podcasts that I couldn't possibly do ever again. But because Jamie was so open, because the superintendent was willing, because I was so close, and because I'm— oh, I'm a teacher. I— we just tried literally everything. We literally tried everything. Now, what was interesting that you said to me right away, I thought that the big budget line item would be the cost of the teacher workbox, and the camp at the time was a separate cost. Now it's all in one, which obviously Organized 365 was going to fund. But you immediately said, oh no, my superintendent knew there would be additional, you know, slash pockets needed and fees needed. I guess I didn't really realize there would be a financial investment on, on your side for the additional things like index cards. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, our index card budget pretty much doubled. Because that was something they had seen me do it right. Or, or, or what I would do is if they were hitting me with something in the hallway, I would say, email me that, because then I do the print-off thing right, or I write it on an index card when I get back to my office. So index cards definitely increased dramatically, even for the ones. So I want to say something here. The training was mandatory. So anytime Lisa came or anytime I did a session on something, the training was mandatory. The boxes were optional. I did not want somebody taking a box if they were never going to use it because that was a waste of resources for Lisa. And so the training was mandatory because no matter what, I felt like if you have Lisa in the room, you're going to learn something, right?

Yeah.

And so the training was mandatory. So For those people that are like thinking that they want to do something similar to this, there are going to be people that, as Lisa, if you're a follower of Lisa, she tells you to embrace it your way, right?

Yeah.

And so there's people that already have certain things in place that don't— they don't necessarily feel like they need the box or whatever. And if that's— if that's working for them, that's great. It's the ones who it's not working for. So it was not mandatory, but the training was. So I don't remember where I was going with all of that, though.

No, that's okay. But I think that's great because I do think that when we look at adopting things anywhere, but I'm just gonna think about in a school district, you think like, okay, if we're gonna adopt this curriculum, it's X amount of this times X amount of pupils. I wanna kind of Break some paradigms here. We're talking from here on out, we're talking about teachers. Teachers are your human resource in delivering the education transformation for your pupils. And a couple of things happened last summer after we started this pilot. When we did teacher camp, which is a virtual experience, and we break out into small groups, I ended up in a small group of just board members and principals. Like, there were some in there. And so we were just in our own breakout group. And so I was talking about how do you support teachers? Do you have anything for wellness? What do you do for neurodivergence? What do you do for this? And they just looked at me like with blank stares. And this is multiple states represented. This is across the United States. And I was like, well, as kids qualify for IEPs for ADHD, let's say, then we provide modifications and accommodations for them throughout schooling.

Mm-hmm.

So then those kids get teaching degrees, they become teachers, they come back into teaching. What are the modifications and accommodations you have for teachers who have an ADHD diagnosis? And blank stares. I was like, do you have any? They're like, no. I was like, what do you mean no? I was like, I've been to 8,000 IEP meetings, like the IDEA and all these things, and we're gonna— so once that same exact child that got all those accommodations in school becomes a teacher and is now an employee of yours, There are zero accommodations. They're like, correct. Across the board. I, I do not even know how the— I still don't even know how that's possible, that this has not been identified as an area that needs support. What I'm working on in my PhD is showing or finding support for the fact that these boxes externalize working memory. And that gives you more mental capacity in order to do what is most important while not trying to remember your to-do list with your brilliant brain. Put that in a box, deal with that later. But I do not have the research yet to support that. But I believe that is why these are so well received. Also, I'm a teacher. So all of these boxes have every single learning style attached to them. They work for all the different kind of learners because I was a teacher and I was a Montessori teacher. So I understand all of that. So I know that the box works. The second thing that I found in that board member, principal administration small group I was in, I said, what part of your budget is for teacher school supplies? There isn't one. There is a budget for pupil school supplies or supplies for buildings, but not supplies for teachers. It would be the equivalent of saying, like, to a 6th grader, We want you to show up, and we're going to give you schoolbooks, but we're not gonna give you a backpack, and we're not gonna give you a notebook, and we're not gonna give you pens and pencils. Like, ready, go. And so most teachers do buy their own supplies. We all know that. But, but the third part of this is this teacher work box is not just a school supply, but it is the organization of the invisible work of teaching, which we're gonna get into. And whether you take the box or not, The communication of that invisible work between all of the people within a building is the secret sauce. That's why when Jamie said this is gonna be mandatory, I was like, this is a gift to me, and I am going to take this gift as it is given, because I too agree not everyone is gonna want a box. Mostly men are not gonna want a box. Really established teachers not gonna want a box. Really organized teachers not gonna want a box. All new teachers, all special ed, all teachers struggling with org— working memory, all teachers struggling with their organization. They all want the box because as a professional organizer in people's homes, as a teacher of middle school math, and that's where you usually see working memory the most, is when you're teaching long division, because the kids cannot keep all of those steps in their head at the same time. If you are a middle school math teacher, you know we're the ones that are usually giving the referral for an attention check or a working memory check or, or something like that, because we see it in math. It's so much easier to see in math than it is in language arts. And so when you see that you need more external supports, it's a simple box. Organization is done in analog, productivity is done digitally. You cannot organize digitally. You have to organize in analog. Now, if you're seasoned and you've figured out your systems, you can jump to the digital. We'll talk about that later. But it is the analog. It's making visible the invisible things and the communication between teachers, assistant principals, principals, superintendents. We'll talk about this in the next episode, but we did have Student teachers, principals, and an assistant superintendent in the room when we did the first session, and immediately there was a bunch of invisible work that no one at their own level could solve and would have never surfaced had we not done that meeting.

Correct. And I think when it goes back to the supplies, so I am lucky that I do have a fairly decent supply budget, and teachers at the beginning of the year, like, say, okay, I need this many Expo markers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But with the index cards, it was kind of neat to see the way even their minds worked, because originally we gave them white ones. Well, then I had some of my teachers that are like, I would like some of the colored ones. So I went and bought the, the different colored ones. Then I had some teachers that were like, okay, I need different colors of pens because I, I like the white, but I, I need those. So meeting the teachers where they were, even the teachers who didn't take the box, I saw a drastic increase when we came to any meeting throughout the year. They would have index cards. We had our handbook meeting recently and they had stuff on index cards, and I saw them like when they got it done, they would take the index card and set it off to the side, or they— I think some of them got like extra, like they would rip it like it's done. So I think that There was a change of getting things out of their head, no matter if they bought— got the box or not. The other thing that went up was sticky notes, because I think teachers in general, just like we probably have sticky note glue somewhere in our blood. It's like we're, you know, 90%, 97% body and 3% sticky notes. So some of them, instead of doing the index cards, they did the sticky note system. But it did— I did at least see them getting things out of their head, and that was a big, big difference.

Yes. So, um, had any of your teachers— so 13 out of 50 to take the box before, um, I even came to the building is a high amount in my estimation. Did they— had they already heard of Organized 365? Did they at least know what the box— do you know of those? Like, if you think about the people that drove over the 4th of July weekend to school to get a box to get into a camp, like—

I think most of them were ones that I was— the ones that I am in communication with. So they were aware of it. Then we had probably by the time you came to the visit, I think we had in the high 20s because several of them took them the first teacher day, which you weren't able— you weren't there. But I would say the ones who made the trip over were either my gung-ho, willing to try new things all the time, willing to jump in the deep end ones, or they were ones that I had already had the relationship with.

Okay.

So they had seen changes in me.

And I will say, if I had my— if I— if it was a perfect world for me, I would have everyone start with the Sunday Basket, not the Teacher Workbox, because to start out the gate with the Teacher Workbox right into Teacher Camp on day 1 is, um, I mean, it's It's fine. It's gonna organize your school. But you're new to Organize 365. You're new to the idea of making visible your invisible work on index cards and checklists. You're new to color coding. So if, if you can imagine binder inserts, plastic binder inserts that have tabs that you put in a binder like from Avery, and they're a rainbow order, and they're usually not like red, orange, yellow, green, blue. They're just like a random rainbow order. That's where I got the idea from. But I manufacture my own slash buckets, so I have them in sets of 5. So 5 tabs down the side. I have 5 pink, 5 blue, 5 green, 5. So there are a lot. So you can, and each color means something. So you're learning how to externalize these ideas. You're learning what the colors mean, because everything has a color for me. If you're watching the video, you see behind me the colors that are represented in the education work box. You're just learning a lot very, very quickly. If you start with the Sunday Basket, which is the household management kitchen counter solution, it has a few less of the slash pockets, and everybody— how everybody's household is 80% the same. I mean, yours is a little bit different. Maybe you have different people in it. Maybe you have more animals than you have kids, whatever. We all have to do meal planning. We all have to do laundry. We all have holidays. We all have birthdays. We all have bills to pay. We all have errands to run. Like, there's a lot of similarity. So when you set up an educa— a Sunday basket, you can get it set up and going within 6 weeks. So in the perfect world, I would have teachers starting with a Sunday basket the day they, they are done with school for the year, and do that in May and June, and then join us for the Teacher Workbox Camp in July. Because they, first of all, they will have started to organize their own personal life, which I think has a bigger impact and started to use the system and gotten used to Organize 365, and then they can apply it to work. Because one of my personal goals is for teachers to get some of their time back for their families. And if they have time for their family, they will stay in teaching longer. But if they don't, eventually, if they have to choose, they're going to choose their family over teaching, because they're the only one that could be part of their family. So if we could start to organize their personal, that is more helpful because of the timing of this. We threw them right in the deep end, and we worked worried about the Sunday basket later. What, what are your thoughts on that, Jamie?

I thought the exact same thing. That was something. I mean, again, we did what we did, what we could with what we knew at the time. But definitely, I think some of them got overwhelmed with the number of emails and Oh gosh, my email was terrible at that time. Well, and then just the amount of knowledge that was flying at them because in Organized 365 the summer, you know, that's when we do a bunch of our stuff. So you were, you were hitting us and we were all the ones that had been following you for a while were always like, yes, I love it. But then like, that was one thing my superintendent, I had to train him how to filter his emails because he was like, well, I want to see her stuff, but like, wow. And I was like, it's fine. So I think them not having that common language, especially the ones that attended camp, there was a lot of side phone calls to me or text messages as like, how do you use this? And those types of things, which then I also realized I use mine differently. Because I'm the principal. So like, I was even struggling a little bit, like, ooh, how would you use that in the classroom? Because I have the Education WorkBox, but I also have the WorkBox, the Friday WorkBox, because I have a little bit of all of them. So like, then we would have conversations. But I do think there were the ones who really wanted to embrace it. It was a lot for them to, to embrace it. And, and I think too, like, We go back to what I said early on. If your mind is not— if your mindset isn't there and your, and your mind at home is a hot mess, you can only take on so much more at work. Because again, your home, whether, whether employers want to admit it or not, if their home life is a hot mess, they're going to be a hot mess at work because it's going to flow over into it.

Yeah.

They may have different— they're, you know, we've all seen that iceberg analogy where the top is what you're seeing and then the bottom, like, or the duck analogy where they're just paddling underneath.

Yeah.

That's— you're gonna see that calmness because especially at the principal level, right? They don't want you to see that they are struggling. Right. Yeah. They're going to hide it as best as they can. If, if you're seeing the struggling, The underneath is just a disaster because nobody wants— like, just think of you at your own house. When we know people are coming over, we frantically go around cleaning and shoving and doing whatever because nobody wants somebody to see them struggle.

Yeah.

And so I think that, that, that was— we realized that along the way, which is then where I had kind of did my September, which we— I think we're going to talk about in a different one what I kind of did at the September, um, because you came in August, October, and December. And so I did a training in September on like time management and that kind of thing. Um, yeah.

Yes. And yeah, each building, each state, each district is going to have their own things. So for this to work going forward, for this to scale, to use a business term. Um, I do think there needs to be an Organize365 advocate inside of the building that understands this, that not everybody is brand new to this system, so that they can answer questions and they can translate. Like, I can't possibly know— like, when you keep calling it a corporation and we call them school districts, I was like, that's so cool, and I've never heard that before. And so just even that little bit of language change For someone, your, your teachers who are new to learning the product, it is gonna throw them and cause confusion and make it a little bit harder for them to learn. So I know that this pilot was our first pilot. Going forward, there will not be 100% free pilots like we are. We are fully into implementing these into schools. But there, the more there will be a package where the person that people can work with, that is what is going to really work for teachers. And before we move on, just as a teacher, because I mean, part of why we're doing this whole podcast series is because everybody's going to want to talk to Jamie. That's why we're giving so many details. Just like you would with any other curriculum development or anything else you do inside of a building, can you just let a couple of people in your building buy the Teacher Workbox and reimburse them for that? Yes, we've been doing that in Organize 365 for years. Will that make a difference for that teacher? Yes, absolutely. What I'm hoping to do in this podcast series, and what I think Jamie and I are trying to do collaboratively, is how do we actually make bigger transformation inside of academia? And that is a ridiculously huge lift, and neither of us should even be— neither of us are qualified or should be allowed to do it. But also, I've learned as a female business owner, no one can stop you. So we're doing it. And so I am challenging school boards, superintendents, principals to think about the teacher. And also, you can do this at any level inside of a building, but think about your teachers and then think about the students and think about how everything that you do goes through the question, how does this impact the students? Like, every decision at a principal or superintendent or board level is, how does this impact our ultimate customer, which is the How does this help the student? And I'm here to tell you, a teacher who has less anxiety and more mental bandwidth and feels supported is better for your student, for your pupil, for your end customer. And if it is just this simple box, which they only— it's a one-time fee for the box. Like, the way Organized 365 does things is I know that life gets in the way. And so you start and stop programs all the time.

Yeah.

It's a one-time fee for a lifetime membership. So as soon as a, a teacher gets this box, it includes this camp, this live camp we're talking about every summer, like indefinitely. So it's not like you have to pay for this every year. It's, it's a one-time fee for a lifetime transformation. Just like once you have 3rd grade, you don't take that 3rd grade knowledge away from that student when they move on to 4th grade is kind of how I look at it. Like, You have this, this school supply, this box, and this training, this knowledge, and then an ongoing community of support to support these teachers as they go through. And I really feel like this is the missing piece. Like, all of these teachers have gone to a university and invested big dollars and 4 years in becoming qualified in order to teach these pupils. And then as soon as they graduate, they get put into a district or a corporation That is their community, but they need structure and support for the invisible work, which we'll talk about that later, the invisible work that they're doing inside of their job, and also a way to have a conversation with principals, superintendents to say, hey, I understand there's this problem at this building level, but actually we as the teachers can't solve it. It's a bigger problem. We need to be able to have more conversations. I would say that's the best part of our pilot where when I was in the room and you were in the room and we were having these open, candid conversations with your staff about what was working and what wasn't working, which we'll get into in the next episode.

Sounds good.